I have been using IE for some time on my older slower laptop as it was owned by work and their IT dictated what I could or could not install. Since my own new desktop computer arrives tomorrow and I can put anything I want on it, I'm thinking about browsers. I know IE is not color managed, but both Firefox and Safari are. I don't know about Opera or other choices.

Do people have a favorite browser? What would you recommend and why? (I'm going to be running 64 Bit Win 7 Home Premium on an i7 Quad Core).

As for browsers I like opera overall for its functionality - and since colourmanagement is generally not done by a lot of photographers on the net I suspect that you don't really gain anything by using a browser with this feature. Even if everyone used colour managed browsers there would still be the lack of monitor calibration.
So until such time as true colour calibration on monitors is a standard and online display of images is I think you can do just as well without a colour managed browser.

Thanks for the comments. One site I frequent seems to be frequented by colo(u)r managed folks, but overall I see what you mean.

What makes you like Opera more than the others? I've heard it's much faster, but that's all I know about it. I guess my choice is basically Opera, Safari, Foxfire, and IE (although I've grown to hate IE, which is why I am looking elsewhere). I don't want to load a bunch of them on the new machine and try them, because I'm trying to keep the new disk as clean as I can.

Generally speaking I find opera's interface quite similar to that of IE so it was easy for me to swap into using opera from the start. It also had a few nice features - a main page that can hold up to 9 hotlinks to sites (like a quick acces favourits list) and also a built in EXIF reader for pics.

It has a few downsides in that it tends tobe a little less compatable than IE with some websites (mostly those running a lot of flash interface and the like) though overall I've only found 3 sites that thus far don't like it.

To be honest though, dispite what people say I think most of the browsers work well and the debates about usage are probably more based on the erganomics of each more so than things like speed (be honest here unless you are on a very lowend machin or runninga heck of a lot of programs all at once the speed differences are generally quite marginal)

What are you trying to do? Look at colour managed images? With IE and Google Chrome taking up most of the market share of the internet and not being colour managed, plus the fact that like 0.00000000000000000001% of the worlds population uses screens with wide gamuts I don't know why there are non-sRGB images on the net to begin with.

Anyway if you do need to use colour managed browsers then you already know what options there are. I use Firefox because not all colour management is equal. Firefox is the only browser on the market with will render the internet according to your screen's colour profile. I.e. it doesn't just understand ICC profiles, but it also knows how to convert colours so they look correctly according to a calibration profile of your screen.

I'm kind of stuck using Firefox, though if I didn't have a monitor with a wide colour gamut I would happily switch to google chrome.

Thanks, Garbz. In at least one bird photography forum I participate in, many members harp on color management. They seem to be divided between Safari and FF. So, you are saying that FF is the only one that will render it according to my wide-gamut screen and that Safari won't? Since I have no particular interest in any one browser, I may as wll go with FF, then. Why would you switch to Google Chrome? What is the downside to FF? Thanks.